Why do archive files on Britain’s colonial past keep going missing? Siobhan Fenton
he National Archives are
home to more than 11m documents, many of them covering the most disturbing
periods of Britain’s colonial past. The uncomfortable truths revealed in
previously classified government files have proved invaluable to those seeking
to understand this country’s history or to expose past injustices. It is deeply
concerning, therefore, to discover that about 1,000 files have gone missing after being removed by
civil servants. Officially, the archives describe them as “misplaced while on
loan to a government department”.
The files, each
containing dozens of pages, cover subjects such as the Troubles in Northern
Ireland, the British colonial administration in Palestine, tests on polio
vaccines and territorial disputes between the UK and Argentina. It is unclear
whether duplicates exist. The loss of so many
documents of such significance has understandably caused concern among
historians, politicians and human rights groups. Amnesty International has
called on Theresa May to order an urgent government-wide search for the
documents, while Labour MP Jon Trickett has warned that the loss “will only
fuel accusations of a cover-up”. Such suggestions may
seem far-fetched, but recent history has given many people reason to be
suspicious. Documents in the National Archives have
previously been key in revealing human rights abuses by the British state.
In 2014, for instance,
investigators from the Irish broadcaster RTÉ uncovered a 1977 letter from the then home secretary, Merlyn Rees, to the
prime minister of the day, James Callaghan, in which Rees claimed that
ministers had given permission for torture to be used in Northern Ireland
during the Troubles. The information had reportedly been withheld from the
European court of human rights.
Also in 2014, the
government was accused of a cover-up after it said it could not release
information about the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” programmebecause the files had
suffered “water damage” .
In 2013, meanwhile,
the Guardian revealed that more than 1m documents that should have been
declassified were instead being unlawfully kept at a high-security compound in Buckinghamshire. Their existence only
came to light when a group of elderly Kenyans took the government to the high
court, claiming they had been tortured during the 1950s Mau Mau rebellion. The Foreign Office was forced to admit it had
withheld thousands of colonial-era papers… read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/dec/27/archive-files-britain-colonial-past-government
